None to Accompany Me (37 page)

Her eyes moved in resentful alarm. —You wouldn't be involved directly.—

—No.— His hand blotted the photographs spread across
three columns. —But I'd be seen, for good, as being among those who were.—

She took an orange and separated its sections. He was looking at her indulgently, carefully, from the very limit of trust between them, testing if he could even accept, from her, that she might think him capable of theft—for which ‘unacceptable practice' was simply the Drommedaris name in the world where he risked himself now.

—What would my tenant do? Move out?—

She dropped pips from her lips to her cupped hand and looked down as she ate, as if all she had to do to find the answer was finish a mouthful. —I'd know it's sometimes necessary to do things now we wouldn't do in another time. That it was done for a reason, someone, something else.—

He smiled. —Ah no. Be careful. We have to make a lot of new rules but that's not one. A thief is a thief, Vera. You and I cannot be exceptions.—

—You'd be offending God, wouldn't you. Yes. But Zeph I'm not so sure about myself; that consideration not coming into it for me. I might decide money would achieve more for the people, in one place rather than another. I might cross funds … A good thing I don't sit on your Boards.—

—Well if you did, at least you couldn't be accused of being predictable. Black.—

The scandal died down; or was averted by reorganization. Zeph had many discussions with business colleagues at his house. Of course she was not present, kept to her annexe. Sometimes he talked to her later as a consequence rather than a direct account of these discussions. —Can you imagine, there's the example of a factory that regularly produces nearly double the
amount of each order because the workmanship is so sloppy, there are so many items that come out not up to standard that only half the number can be used to fill the order. The waste! The cost! In money, in man-hours! Low productivity can sabotage completely our hopes of raising living standards in the long run. Our talk all these years about redistribution of wealth and land—when we've done that with what was stockpiled for themselves by white regimes, we'll still be unable to compete in world markets if we don't raise productivity. We're far behind successful countries, far behind Korea, Taiwan, China … countries with cheap labour. They produce better goods than we do and on a scale that makes our productivity chicken-feed. We've blamed exploited cheap labour and lack of skills training for our failure. And that's been true, far as we could judge, because we've never had anything else but an exploited labour force. But when our workers are no longer exploited, will they produce more and better? What about the old ways? What are we counting on? That when you have black management, a black executive director, if in some cases the State you voted into power is your boss, you'll put enthusiasm into your work? Motivation. I worry. It won't be a form of protest against the white exploiter to be caught skimping on the job. No more fifty per cent rejects. We need black management that knows how to make people work.—

Vera watched his face, his manner; smiled. —On board. No avoiding it.—

If she happened to encounter his colleagues in passing he introduced her, hand on her shoulder: —My tenant.— If anyone showed curiosity about this tenant, the ageing white woman who lived on his property, he was pleased to have the opportunity to inform them —Mrs Stark is on the Technical Committee. She is one of the people drafting our constitution.—

The tenant. The designation, for the public, suited her well. It was a kind of private play on words, between Zeph Rapulana and Mrs Stark, linking their present arrangement to Odensville, the matter of land, over which they had come to begin to know one another. It was a consequence in which there were loyalties but no dependencies, in which there was feeling caught in no recognized category, having no need to be questioned. On the home ground of the present—violent, bureaucratic, shaking, all at once, expressed in burnt and bloodied bodies, in a passion of refusal, revulsion against institutions, in the knowledge of betrayal by police and army supposed to protect, in the anger turned against itself, in the prolixity of documents—there manages to exist this small space in existence. Yet Vera felt it open, to be traversed by herself:
herself
a final form of company discovered. She was able to do her work on the Committee with total attention, she wrote letters filled with news of it regularly, addressed jointly to Ben and Ivan, she telephoned Annie to enquire after the progress of the baby, she visited the Maqomas and marked off in silent apprehension the passing of another week, another month that perhaps meant Sally, alone in her danger, would survive.

Vera's annexe was really too small for her to have visitors there; only Adam, on his motorbike, occasionally arrived at a weekend, and once took her with his girl-friend to hear a jazz group from what he thought must be her era, in a café crowded with young blacks and whites to whom the music was quaintly new.

Perhaps he had had a request from Ben. Ben was reassured (guilty, somewhere unacknowledged in himself, at leaving her, even if this was for her reasons) that at least she was living on what must be the safest kind of premises, in present conditions, the property of a prominent black man not overtly involved in
politics. But he worried about her way of life, apparently so completely involved, in public, always part of group thinking, group decision, and so withdrawn outside that. Ben searched for her in her letters without success. Ivan, just to satisfy him, suggested she might have taken up some mysticism or other, Sufi or something. No, no—how little could a child know of its own parent! Ben at least had gone far enough with her in her life to know that, wherever she was now, it was not a form of escape. He was diffident to explain to this being who was so much like her in the flesh (the face he addressed himself to made it seem to him it was her he was talking to) that she belonged to the reality back there as he himself never had, never could try to, except through her. Ivan occasionally wondered why it was apparently impossible for Ben to go back; but it was a bargain he made with himself that if he didn't pry into the parents' lives they wouldn't pry into his own. He and this sometimes strange father were close on their own terms; there was no financial burden, he was making plenty of money; so long as he himself didn't find a woman he really wanted to marry they could go on perfectly well living together in odd bachelordom. His colleagues rather admired him for his affection for this handsome ageing parent they encountered in the Holland Park house. Evidently he had been an artist of some kind. According to Ivan, he kept himself busy going round the exhibitions.

One winter night in that year a pipe burst, flooding outside Vera's annexe, and she put her leather jacket over pyjamas and went to turn off the main water control in the yard. The tap was tight with chlorine deposits and would not budge in hands that became clumsy with cold. She quietly entered the house. Vera always had access, with a second set of keys Zeph had given her; she kept an eye on the house while he was away on business trips or spent a few days with his family in Odensville. The keys were
also a precaution Zeph insisted on for her safety; if anything or anyone threatened her, a woman alone, she could come to him. The disposition of rooms in his house was familiar under her hands in the dark. She would not disturb him by turning on lights. She was making her way without a creak of floor-boards or any contact with objects to the cupboard in the passage between his bedroom and the bathroom where she knew she would find pliers.

Without any awareness of a shape darker than the darkness she came into contact with a warm soft body.

Breathing, heartbeats.

Once she had picked up an injured bird and felt a living substance like that.

Through her open jacket this one was against her, breasts against breasts, belly against belly; each was afraid to draw away because this would confirm to the other that there really had been a presence, not an illusion out of the old unknown of darkness that takes over even in the protection of a locked house. Vera was conscious of the metal tool in her hand, as if she really were some intruder ready to strike. For a few seconds, maybe, she and the girl were tenderly fused in the sap-scent of semen that came from her. Then Vera backed away, and the girl turned and ran on bare feet to his bedroom where the unlatched door let her return without a sound.

Vera came out into the biting ebony-blue of winter air as if she dived into the delicious shock of it. She turned off the tap with the satisfaction of a woman performing a workman-like task. Instead of at once entering her annexe she went into the garden, the jacket zipped closed over live warmth. Cold seared her lips and eyelids; frosted the arrangement of two chairs and table; everything stripped. Not a leaf on the scoured smooth limbs of the trees, and the bushes like tangled wire; dried palm
fronds stiff as her fingers. A thick trail of smashed ice crackling light, stars blinded her as she let her head dip back; under the swing of the sky she stood, feet planted, on the axis of the night world. Vera walked there, for a while. And then took up her way, breath scrolling out, a signature before her.

1
Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging. A white militant right-wing resistance movement.

2
Transvaal Provincial Administration.

3
Literally ‘auntie' in Afrikaans. Originally respectful, became a way of referring disparagingly to any middle-aged or old woman.

4
Azanian People's Liberation Army.

5
Flag of the old Transvaal Boer Republic.

Nadine Gordimer's recent books are
My Son's Story
(1990) and
Jump and Other Stories
(1991). She was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991. She lives in Johannesburg.

NOVELS
The Lying Days / A World of Strangers / Occasion for Loving
The Late Bourgeois World / A Guest of Honour
The Conservationist / Burger's Daughter / July's People
A Sport of Nature / My Son's Story / None to Accompany Me
The House Gun / The Pickup / Get a Life / No Time Like the Present

STORY COLLECTIONS
The Soft Voice of the Serpent / Six Feet of the Country
Friday's Footprint / Not for Publication
Livingstone's Companions
A Soldier's Embrace / Something Out There
Jump / Loot / Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black / Life Times

ESSAYS
The Black Interpreters / On the Mines (
with David Goldblatt
)
Lifetimes under Apartheid (
with David Goldblatt
)
The Essential Gesture — Writing, Politics and Places (
edited by Stephen Clingman
)
Writing and Being
Living in Hope and History: Notes from Our Century
Telling Times: Writing and Living, 1954–2008

EDITOR, CONTRIBUTOR
Telling Tales

First published in Great Britain 1994 Copyright © 1994 by Felix Licensing, B.V.

This electronic edition published in 2012 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

The moral right of the author has been asserted

All rights reserved. You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 9781408832998

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